Friday, December 26, 2008

2008 Celebrity Divorces

It’s that year-end time of the year. Lists, lists, and more lists. Top movies, top records, top video games, etc. You can find those on a gazillion blogs. But what about the celebrity divorces of 2008? Precious few. Thanks to Jill Brooke and firstwivesworld.com here they are.

Compare them with your predictions from last year. But Chris Kattan and Sunshine Tutt -- that was a real crusher.

24 comments
:

Why can’t they just muddle through like the rest of us? On the bright side, it paves the way for the even more delightful subsequent Hollywood nuptials, where the bride and groom exchange heartfelt vows written for them by children and stepchildren from previous marriages.

Out here on the prairie, out secret pretty much seems to be lack of imagination and opportunity. But hey, don’t knock it. At least we’ve stopped finishing each other’s sentences. We just don’t talk. Yes that’s right, anytime after the first 20 years, you too can turn into Alan King.

Please God, don’t let this stop all further discussion, as seems to be my habit. Or is it just always posting late? Just tired of feelin' like a friggin' epilogue.

"A. Buck Short said... Why can’t they just muddle through like the rest of us?"

What "rest of us"? Of all the friends whose (first) weddings I attended or participated in over the last 40 years, I know exactly 2 couples who are still married to their original spouses, and one of those couples are devout Catholics who feel they have to stayed stapled together no matter how miserable they are, as they think Hell will be worse. (Boy are they wrong.)

Nearly everyone who gets married gets divorced. Lifelong marriage doesn't work, never did. In the words of Oscar Wilde: "Divorces are made in Heaven."

I found this a touching, sentimental holiday posting. Makes one want to snuggle down, watch our old divorce videos, and say "Remember our first divorce?"

I am particularly delighted to see that my future ex-husband Brendan Fraser has freed himself up for me. Now we only have to meet. 9 years I've waited for him to dump that hussy.

But this post raises one unanswerable question (Though, having met the woman in question, I suppose I could just ask her myself): What on earth took Gretchen Bonaduce so long to wise up?

I forget; when was it that Anne Heche divorced Reality?

So Robin Williams has divorced Masha? It seems like only yesterday that he had the affair with her that broke up his first marriage, when she was his kids' nanny. Somewhere the first Mrs. Willimas is smirking.

Marg Helgenberger and Alan Rosenberg? What? Was she voting against a SAG strike?

Madonna and A-Rod BOTH getting divorces the same year? What were the odds on THAT coincidence?

So is Linda Hogan still married to Bruce Banner, or did she divorce them both?

Pam Shriver should be glad she got to divorce George Lazenby. I believe his last wife was shot by Blofeld. As long as she isn't required to now marry Roger Moore, she should be fine.

I'm just glad that Starr Jones didn't wring as much intense egocentric publicity from her divorce as she did from her wedding. You had to be seriously nuts to have married her in the first place. When someone makes THAT big a deal out of their wedding, as though it were the wedding to top all weddings, and then the marriage falls apart, there should be a special public pillorying equal to all the noise she made about the wedding.

(Utterly off-topic, but I'm watching a show on PBS as I type this, and they just put up the caption "Recorded Earlier" over a scene of Robert Preston performing. Yeah, I should think so. He died 21 years ago.)

I'm a "confirmed bachelor" myself, although the cats and I still have discussions over who gets which sides of the bed.

What's sad about knowing divorces? And I know considerably more than "several". Try dozens. Staying locked in marriage long after love has gone, and even after it has turned to hate, is far worse than sad.

My parents however, never divorced, though I begged them to. The kids from "Broken Homes" were cut so much more slack. But my Mom was my Dad's second wife, and Dad was Mother's third husband. In fact, I'm the only member of my family without a divorce in my past, and I know that's because I never married.

Next up: the fight to legalize gay divorce. That's the only thing worse than not beinng allowed to marry someone you love: not being able to divorce someone you hate.

My parents are from Kentucky, but their marriage history is positively Hollywoodian:

They married at 18 and 16. Had me. Divorced. Mom remarried, but was divorced by the time I was two. Mom and Dad remarried each other shortly thereafter, had 3 more kids, stayed together another 17 years, then divorced. Dad has remarried 3 times since, Mom 1 time. Their current marriages have been going strong for a couple of decades, so I think maybe that's it.

Despite these shining examples of tireless belief in the institution, I've never taken the plunge (though I've been engaged once, and have a few years of cohabitation under my belt).

I'm hoping my time in L.A. will lead to at least one quickie celeb marriage. Anna Faris will do nicely. Please don't give my number to Heather Mills.

In an ideal world, people would be able to stay together forever, and be happy forever.

But that means people need to interested in each other forever. And that's really really hard when you consider that humans are in general always interested in the next best thing, the things they don't have. We are hunters and gatherers.

Oh and the men are also promiscuous with the need to spread their genes, that might be a problem too...

You people who’ve never married, how on earth can you possibly know what to do or think?

A widely overlooked finding in the “polygamous ranch” report, released this week by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, is that another secret to my own personal marital fidelity has been an inablity to bear the thought of disappointing more than one woman at a time. In contrast, Mr. Jeffs revealed his own secret bliss, within the multiple marriage concept, emanated from the Lazyboy recliner he maintained in something called the “Yearning for Quiet” basement.

My wife, on the other hand, protests her secret is as simple as the inability to distinguish which is Dylan McDermott and which is Dermott Mulroney.

"AlaskaRay said... I'm also a confirmed bachelor, or would be if my wife let me.Ray"

Ray, you should be aware that "Confirmed Bachelor" is old Hollywood movie publicity code for "Homosexual". "Sorry ladies, Clifton Webb is a confirmed bacelor." "Tab Hunter is a confirmed bachelor." "Rock Hudson is a confirmed bachelor." And that is certainly the meaning I was intending.

So perhaps you might want to think a moment before confirming yourself. It may come as a shock to your wife.

It's amusing to see that, even in 2008, the phrase still fools some people. It's long been an open joke to many of us in the Confirmed Bachelor Community."

The two "conventional" kids in my family: my sister was a single mother and my brother was married twice and isn't married to his current (although that relationship is the most solid of his three). Me? The hippie weirdo libertarian of the family?

"Anonymous said... You know what Ken? This post is simply depressing.Nothing funny or poignant about it."

Well I agree it wasn't poignant. One seldom encounters the poignant here.

But the only depressing aspect of it I noticed was poor Gretchen Bonaduce taking 16 years to wise up to the fact that she was married to a maniac she shoul have run from rather than marry. And of course, that people keep marrying Anne Heche for some reason.

When other people's divorces depress you, you're too invested in the mistakes of famous strangers.

Would you have found a list of celebrity weddings this year cheering? It would only be a list of future divorces.

"Cynicism" is what romantics call realists. Anyway, look at the bright side, none of these couples killed each other. Not an OJ divorce among them, and believe me, no jury would have convicted Gretchen, or Guy Ritchie.

Besides, with a good settlement, divorce becomes the gift that keeps on giving.

Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall list celebrity partings till it be morrow.

I, too, have no idea who most of these people are. I guess that means I'm more out of touch than I realize. However, I do know that Phil Collins informed the wife (previous to the one he just divorced) that he was divorcing her via a letter delivered by Fed-Ex. I can't believe I remember that bit of information. Suddenly I feel like a very pathetic person.

I've heard of less than half of them, and care for none except Paul McCartney. Why he married that slut is beyond all reason. I can only assume he was reading a lot of old Penthouse magazines and got caught up in the idea of having sex with an amputee.

About KEN LEVINE

Named one of the BEST 25 BLOGS by TIME Magazine. Ken Levine is an Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer. In a career that has spanned over 30 years Ken has worked on MASH, CHEERS, FRASIER, THE SIMPSONS, WINGS, EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND, BECKER, DHARMA & GREG, and has co-created three series. He and his partner wrote the feature VOLUNTEERS. Ken has also been the radio/TV play-by-play voice of the Baltimore Orioles, Seattle Mariners, San Diego Padres. and Dodger Talk. He hosts the podcast HOLLYWOOD & LEVINE

Ken Being Social

Ken's Book Club

A collection of long-form Levine

MUST KILL TV: Ken's explosive and hilarious satire of the TV industry - now in paperback and Kindle